About
Small consultancy, deliberately.
Method & Measure is Marc Beaton — a business-process and data consultant for companies that run on spreadsheets, email and effort.
Marc’s background starts on the other side of the table: a sales career that ran from consumer into consultative B2B sales for a large software company — work that is mostly the job of telling the difference between what someone asks for and what they actually need. That habit is what the practice is built on. It’s why the audit comes first, so what gets built is scoped to the problem you’ve actually got rather than the biggest one he could sell you.
Since then, three years modernising data infrastructure and reporting, in a local authority’s children’s services and in private-sector healthcare: two places where a wrong number has consequences, and where access to a record is governed by law rather than convenience.
It stays a small practice on purpose. That keeps the work honest: nothing gets promised by someone who won’t be the one delivering it, and nothing about your process gets lost in a handover.
The safeguards
Who can see it, and who owns it.
Settled in writing, per project, before anything gets built — because the background here is in places where who may see which record is a legal question rather than a preference.
Controlled access
Named accounts, roles that match what people actually do, and a change log that records who did what. Where a workflow needs stricter separation than that, it gets scoped in the build.
Hosting you can point at
Every deployment runs over HTTPS. Where I host, that means UK or EU servers, nightly off-site backups and monitored patching. Where you host, you get the scripts and the runbook to do the same.
Your data stays yours
Source code, schema, migrations and deployment scripts hand over as standard. Full export is available at any time on every plan — there is no licence fee and nothing that stops another developer taking over.
Project-scoped handling
During an audit or a migration I ask for the narrowest set of records that answers the question, transferred by a method you're happy with. I'll sign an NDA before you send anything.
Principles
What Marc holds to.
- The audit can conclude 'don't'
- If the honest answer is that the spreadsheet is fine and the problem is somewhere else, that's what the report says. It's a worse day for me and a better one for you.
- You deal with whoever builds it
- Estimates come from the person doing the work. Nothing gets passed to a team you've never met.
- Boring tools on purpose
- Relational databases, plain web apps, servers you can point at. Boring is what still works in five years and what another developer can pick up without a handover call.
- One useful workflow first
- The aim isn't the largest possible build. It's to find one process worth fixing, show the answer early, and keep the risk of changing it small.